removing a no longer existing twitter user from a list (using Tweepy)

Question

Hi I have been trying to remove non existing twitter users from a list. The reason I want to do this is because overtime I run my code some of the twitter users no longer exist and I get this error

kages/tweepy-3.6.0-py3.6.egg/tweepy/binder.py", line 234, in execute
tweepy.error.TweepError: [{'code': 34, 'message': 'Sorry, that page does not exist.'}]

I can't finish collecting my data because this error keeps stopping the code form running so I have been manually going one by one through my list and finding the twitter accounts that don't exist on twitter which is very inefficient. So I have been trying to use a try except block to override this code, as in remove the usernames that no longer exist and keep running my program but everything I have attempted doesn't work. This is my try except block without tweepy (just regular code) which works.

l=["b",23,"c",6,5]
print(l)
for i in range(0,10):
    try:
        for a in l:
            print("a=",int(a))
    except ValueError:
        l.remove(a)
        print(l)
        continue
    else:
        print(l)
        continue

Now I tried to implement this into my twitter list

pro_trump=['TruthSerum888','karlyherron', 'R41nB14ck', 'RedApplePol', 'MKhaoS_86']
for i in range(0,3):
    try:
        for screen_name in pro_trump:
            user_followers=api.friends_ids(id=screen_name)# this returns the interger value of the user id a sepcifc user is following

    except tweepy.error.TweepError:
        print("screen_name that failed=",  screen_name)
        pro_trump.remove(screen_name)
        print(pro_trump)
        continue
    else:# if no error
        print(pro_trump)
        continue

But it doesn't work. it just goes through the pro_trump list removing each username through the list regardless of if the tweeter account still exists or not. Can someone help me implement what I actually wish my code would do?

Answer 1

The problem is being caused by your call of api.friends_ids, which throws a rate limit exceeded error. That in turn triggers the except code-block in each loop, regardless of whether the screen-name is right or not. Without the rate limit error, the code works as is. I replaced that call by api.get_user(id=screen_name) to test. You can include an if-else block inside except to only remove users when it's the correct error. I've also optimized your code to place the for loop outside the try-except block.

pro_trump=['TruthSerum888','karlyherron', 'R41nB14ck', 'RedApplePol', 'MKhaoS_86']
for screen_name in pro_trump:
    try:
        user_followers=api.friends_ids(id=screen_name)# this returns the interger value of the user id a sepcifc user is following

    except tweepy.error.TweepError as t:
        if t.message[0]['code'] == 50: # The code corresponding to the user not found error
            print("screen_name that failed=",  screen_name)
            pro_trump.remove(screen_name)
            print(pro_trump)
        elif t.message[0]['code'] == 88: # The code for the rate limit error
            time.sleep(15*60) # Sleep for 15 minutes
    else:# if no error
        print(pro_trump)

This way, you also don't need continues at the end, since it has reached the end of the code-block it was executing, and would continue with the loop anyway.